


Pangur Dubh, Pangur Bán

by WinterSwallow



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake (Video Game 2020)
Genre: Prologue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:27:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25647301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinterSwallow/pseuds/WinterSwallow
Summary: The cat returns.
Relationships: Cait Sith & Reeve Tuesti
Comments: 2
Kudos: 13





	Pangur Dubh, Pangur Bán

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warning for mentions of sexual assault of a minor.

Pangur Bán and I at work,

Adepts, equals, cat and clerk:

His whole instinct is to hunt,

Mine to free the meaning pent.

\- Pangur Bán, Anon, 9th Century, translated by Seamus Heaney

Atop the gate of Leiselheim town there is a statue of a cat that wears a crown. It is caught mid-stretch, its back arched in a long curve and the tip of its tail wrapped around its left, hind paw. Its eyes are wicked as it watches all who come and go from the town.

The boy does not tell his Mam or Da, but sometimes that cat creeps in the boy’s bedroom at night.

It curls at the base of the boy’s bed, humming with contentment or climbs up onto his chest and rubs its cold, wet nose on the point of his chin. “Wan milk,” it says, “Bring me kipper.”

And if the boy does not obey, they will find the milk bottles smashed on the stoop in the morning, or his homework shredded to pieces, or a dead rat placed with delicate care among the apples in the kitchen bowl.

And no one will ever believe him that it is the cat who does such wicked things and not him.

*

The cat hates school, especially on sunny days, when the sky is rich as cream and the wind smells of summer. It paces back and forth along the windowsill, lashing his tail, impatient for the bell to ring. He laughs at the teacher with her yellow, rheumy hands and slow way of speaking and threatens to spill her bottle of ink.

He calls to the boy to hurry up and leave his books. To come away, to catch fish in the meadow stream or learn to lie, dozing in the sunshine.

But the boy has his studies to attend to.

*

Leiselheim is the town of a thousand statues. Marble ferrets, squirrels and badgers climb the sides of the town hall. Gargoyles gnaw at waterspouts. A terracotta fox or hare beside your front door is thought to bring good luck. Vendors sell netsuke of soapstone or horn for your pocket on every street corner.

Each summer, tourists pour into the town, to take pictures, with the stone chocobos or dragons or to put their head in the great gaping maw of the basalt behemoth in the town square.

There are old reasons why the town has so many animal statues, but Leiselheim is a modern town of the Mako Age now, so such stories are left to old men and to tourists.

Boy and cat race from doorstep to doorstep to get out of the rain. The boy’s head is too full of dreams of the future, piled up like cumulus clouds, to think of such stories.

The rain turns the stone on the cat’s back and head, dark, but his underbelly is pale, like a fur ruff. He rubs against the boy’s leg as they wait for the rain to stop.

*

The cat doesn’t like the snows. He picks his way daintily through the white powder, and when the drifts grow too high, yowls miserably until the boy is forced to scoop him up and set him on his shoulder.

As he trudges through the snow. the boy tells the cat of his dreams, the buildings and ambitions he has that grow tall as the sky.

Unlike the grown ups, the cat listens with interest and an open mind and does not interrupt except to ask the occasional pertinent question. The cat is very clever. Or would be, if he were not so terribly lazy.

He now climbs down from the boy’s shoulder and crawls into his jacket for warmth. His paws are cold and wet and the boy sneezes. But in a minute, he settles against the boy’s chest, a warm, comforting weight, the thrum of his purr in sync with the boy’s pulse. 

*

Of course, cats are sometimes cruel.

“Why won’t you let them see you? You do all these bold things, and I get the blame.”

The cat licks his chops. “I don’t think that’s up to me.”

*

One Sunday a month, the boy’s Mammy brings him to see his Granda in his small house up in the hills. Da never comes on these trips.

Granda is the boy’s favourite person. He takes him outside to the old well to show him the insides and workings of the pump or makes him little men out of corrugated paper that dance and bounce in the wind on little pleated legs.

The cat never comes with the boy to Granda’s house. He complains about the fusty smell, or the lack of fish in the well.

The boy has never seen the cat be scared of anything else. 

*

The man’s breath is bitter and rancid as he whispers at the boy to hush, _hush, it’s all right._

The boy wriggles and squirms to get away, but the man’s arm is like an iron bar and he is too, too close as he whispers to be quiet, to be good, that he must tell no one. That his mam would be ashamed of him if she were to find out he was a bad boy who did such bad things. And perhaps this is true, because this man is clever, well-spoken and important, and dines with the Mayor and the councilmen, while the boy is just a boy and a stupid one at that.

_Shhh. Sssh._

The boy sobs and the man strokes away his tears with one hand, as he reaches for his belt with the other.

The cat approaches.

*

The most important thing now is that the boy is safe and unharmed and wrapped up in a blanket, drinking cocoa with his Mam. What’s important is that they were able to get hold of McShane and throw him in the clinker before Tú Eistí found him and did something he would later regret for laying hands on his son.

McShane lies in a ball on the floor of his cell, clutching himself and whimpering. The constable will call the night doctor to have a look at his wounds soon enough, but not too soon.

For the life of him though, the constable cannot explain how McShane came upon such deep, deep scratches.

*

The boy lies huddled and shaking in the bed, when the cat slips in his window, wriggles under the crook of his arm and lingers up against him.

He knows the cat is only made of stone, yet tonight, he can feel the warmth of his body, the softness of his fur. He presses him against his side, and feels the thrum of his purr.

*

In his dreams, he moves through the night on velvet paws or takes joy in being quick enough, clever enough to snatch small birds in his mouth.

There is an arrogant ginger tom that makes his home two streets over who needs to be taught a lesson and he spends an entire night singing him into submission, only stopping when the pub landlord throws a beer bottle at him.

In the morning, as he goes to school, he sees shards of brown glass broken on the road and shivers.

*

He asks his Mam why the cat on top of the town gate would wear a crown.

But she does not remember ever seeing such a statue. 

*

On the day the men in white coats come to take his Granda away, his parents make sure the boy is nowhere in sight. They take him to the zoo in the next town over and feed him cake and ice cream.

The cat knows though, and as the boy and his Mam and Dad drive away, the cat sets off in the long grass along the road that leads to the house in the hills.

The boy’s Granda sits at his kitchen table, smoking his pipe as the men in white coats hammer on his front door. The kitchen is filled with his little men, carved of wood or horn or bone, or pleated out of paper. They watch the cat as he peeks through the window. Some wave. 

The old man says a name, and the cat streaks through the window, across the brown linoleum and into the man’s lap an. He buries his head in the cat’s fur and whispers what the cat needs to hear.

*

“Cat’s can’t talk.” He is older now, lying on his back on his bed, reading a textbook of chemistry, he borrowed from the library. The cat jumps onto his desk and paws at Granda’s little paper men, who he has stuck there, with tack. “So, it stands to reason that you’re nae… you’re _not_ a cat.”

“Oh, no?” says the cat. He bats the little men back and forth, so they sway and bounce. “What am I, then?”

“A figment of my imagination,” he says, “An expression of repressed trauma because of… because of that _thing_ that happened when I was small. With Alderman McShane.”

“If you say so, laddie,” says the cat. “You being so learned these days, with all your books, I’m sure you ken best.” He swipes at the little paper figures.

“Don’t do that,” he says, rolling onto his haunches and snapping his book closed. “They don’t like it when you do that.”

“Oh no?” the cat holds the little man between his claws, toying with it as any cat would its prey. “Tell you that, did they?”

The boy colours. “No.”

“Now, I’m no fancy scholar, but I’d say hearing wee paper men talk, that’s a mite weirder than talking to your cat, eh?”

He throws the book at the cat’s head, but the cat has already gone out the window, leaving only the ring of its laughter, hanging in the air like smoke.

*

The fortune-teller comes once a year at the summer festival. She’s a spry old woman and an outright chancer, peddling her trade from town to town through the summer months to keep herself in gin and baccy throughout the winter. The boy, who has lately made a great study of the sciences, is far too old for such foolish superstition.

The girls of the village eat it up, though, giggling and wishing for rich, stupid husbands. The boy watches in distaste from across the square as he stands in line for a hotdog. Three girls from his school pay their gil and each pulls a slip of paper from the fortune-teller’s enormous, pleated fan.

“Good health and wealth for me this year, and my lucky number is 16.”

“A long journey for me and a reunion with an old friend.”

“A chance to right old wrongs. Blue is unlucky.”

The girls dash away, shrieking and laughing and the strings of paper are trampled into the mud.

The cat sniffs at the fortunes disdainfully. “That’s not what it says at t’all. It says that in a year, one will be bled, one will be wed and one will be dead,” he says.

Then he curls back around the boy’s feet, mewling and looking to be fed a piece of sausage.

*

Ailbhe Bourke has a bit of a reputation, so it comes as no surprise to the townsfolk when her father and brothers pay John Craddog a visit late one night and the next Saturday Ailbhe becomes Mrs Craddog before she can start to show. Deep in his studies, the boy barely notices.

He notices, but wishes he didn’t have to listen, when his friend Allistair and Jenny O’Seagdha come knocking frantically on his window late one evening to say that there was blood down there when they had… you know and did he think that was normal?

It is only when Morag Reidy dies in a freak accident when a brick flung from a passing masonry truck hits her, does he think of the cat’s fortune.

“You knew this was going to happen. You said – ”

“Don’ be doaty,” says the cat, rolling on his back on the boy’s pillow. “Cat’s don’ tell fortunes.”

*

The boy sits in the mayor’s office, in his best suit and his father’s tie. His hands are damp with sweat as he grips the legs of his trousers.

“Of course, we are all proud of you, m’boy.” The mayor takes a slow circuit of his office. “First in your exams for the entire region, first from Leiselheim to go to Midgar for university, first to be accepted into the Academie des Sciences. You do our little town proud.”

“Th-thank you, Sir.”

The mayor is standing directly behind him, and the boy wonders did he remember to wash the back of his neck. His skin feels clammy.

“A scholarship is traditional,” says the mayor, “To help you on your way.”

“T-thank you, Sir.”

“Of course, its important that anyone the town supports in an official capacity must have an impeccable reputation. I wonder is there anything you would like to get off your chest here and now.”

“Sir?”

“Anything you ever said and later regretted, for instance? Anything you think you may have been mistaken about, given reflection.”

The mayor’s hand falls heavy on his shoulder. “Children can be so easily mistaken.”

*

Alderman McShane will no longer have to lurk, outcast in his country house. His wealth and title will be restored. His friends may call on him again.

He tells the men down the pub he holds no ill will, even after all these long years. After all, the boy is just a poor, stupid boy. 

*

The boy will receive his scholarship. He leaves for the city at summer’s end.

His parents beam with pride.

They take a formal photograph on the steps of the town hall.

The mayor’s hand rests on the boy’s shoulder.

*

Though his wealth and honour our restored, the alderman finds he cannot settle in Leiselheim.

Perhaps it is the statues, the eerie statues with their empty eyes that seem to follow him wherever he goes.

Perhaps it is the townsfolk who have not forgotten the stories of how he came across his long scars.

Or perhaps it is the cats. Yes, it is the cats, disgusting, feral creatures staring, screeching, hissing, disease ridden and filthy. He never could stand cats. The town seems overrun with them.

Perhaps a long holiday is in order. Yes, Junon, or even the Golden Saucer.

He leaves in the night, without speaking to anyone.

The cat follows.

*

The boy prepares for university in the autumn, packs his bags, takes a job in the water works to raise a little money before school.

The cat is nowhere in sight.

It is a relief.

*

Sometimes the cat forgets he was ever a boy. He forgets that there was a boy to begin with. He becomes just another rangy tom, slinking through back alleys in search of his next meal, hissing at any human who would dare come too close, knocking over dustbins in search of a rind of bacon or a lick of cream.

But always, the memory of his prey calls him back to the chase and he pads ever onwards.

*

And sometimes the boy wakes, hungry or frightened or enraged, turns over and goes back to sleep. 

*

On the evening the boy is to leave he takes a car and drives to the anonymous grey building in the next town over.

He signs the big ledger at the front desk, and the man with the big ring of keys lets him through the door and up into the ward.

His granda is a small man and he does not know if years in St. Hyne’s have done this to him, or if it was always so. A lick of the old joy lights his eyes though, when he sees his grandson. “Ah, so it’s yourself, is it?”

“I’ve come to say goodbye.”

The boy sits tentatively on the very edge of the stool and tells his Granda of his plans for the journey, his dreams of studying engineering and of building hospitals and railways with this new clean energy source.

“Where’s your friend?” says the old man slyly.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says quietly.

“Oh no?” The old man’s eyes are gimlet sharp. “You’ve a gift, boy, like none I’ve seen, but you are treading dangerous ground now.”

The boy dissembles. He is used to this, to people telling him how clever he is, how bright, how special. But to hear it from his Granda’s mouth makes his skin crawl.

“That’s not what I mean,” says the old man when he starts his protest, “And I think you know it. Have a care, lad. It’s not wise to split your soul clean in two.”

“I don’t…”

The old man sighs. “Perhaps I shouldnae have allowed it when you were a bairn, but it seemed cruel to stifle such a gift.”

He draws himself up/. “Grandfather, I really do not know what you mean.”

“Only that a life lived in fear means a death soaked in regret and that if a man doesn’t know himself, then he’s not truly a man at all, he’s no more than a puppet.”

His Granda turns away from him then, and his eyes look out somewhere beyond the window frame. “Take care of yourself in the big city. We’ll not see each other again, that I know.”

*

Sitting in the car, parked up on the verge by the hospital gates, the boy cries hot, angry tears.

*

The paper men no longer move for him.

*

Alderman McShane loses his luck in the Golden Saucer, and no matter how many gil he pours into the place, cannot seem to find it again.

He stumbles onto the rope bridge at midnight, drunk and testy and poisoned with lust. The Saucer will cater to any tastes for the right price. But the Alderman no longer has the right price.

But there, standing near the bridge’s midpoint is a boy, unaccompanied, his dark hair uncovered.

The man struts forward. He seizes the boy about the shoulder. “Come here, child, I want to show you something.”

The boy turns and the man sees…

The cat. His teeth are sharp. His claws are sharper. His eyes gleam.

The man stumbles back, up and over.

His scream is cut off abruptly.

*

In the morning, the miners find the body in the gully. Some fool drunk from up above has stumbled out onto the rope bridge in the night and missed his footing. Such things are common enough.

What’s odd is not the twist of his neck, or the swell of his gut or the emptiness of his pockets, but the chips of smashed up stone that lie around the body. The miners, who know of such things can see the stone was not mined from any quarry within a thousand miles of here. One miner comments that it might have been a statue of some sort of animal, but the fragments are too smashed to tell what kind.

He pockets the stone crown to bring it home to his children.

*

In a dorm room, an ocean away, a boy lies in his bunk bed and curls his knees up into his chest, as something is lost to him forever.

*

The boy becomes a man.

The man wonders if he has become a monster.

He slips deeper into the torpor of his work.

He does not see the cat again.

*

The fumes from the mako are green and heady. He stands gripping the railing as he waits for the cool down procedure for pump number 12 to finish. The engineers make small talk about last night’s game. 

He looks down into the mako and cannot bring himself to participate in their chatter.

The events of last night’s incident play in his head on repeat; blood on the carpet, bodies glimpsed in row after row of black bags. Turks hustling him out of his own domain and the instruction to forget it. Immediately.

In the smoky haze, something moves; a predator stalks its prey. 

His identity has always rested on his rationality. As a man he is calm and thoughtful, a scholar and a scientist, given to complacency perhaps, but never rash or foolish emotion.

A sound below the roar of the pump, lower, softer; strange and yet familiar.

Yet now fury bites at him like the teeth of a wild animal. Sharp and white, it sinks into his throat and won’t let go. In silence, he rages at the terrorists who would conceive such an act; at the company, who would cover it up; at his own impotence.

Soft paws make no sound upon the metal gantry. A tail flicks this way and that.

Something inside him breaks, or opens or unravels.

He reaches out and feels soft fur as a back arch under his hand, a long languorous stretch as if just roused from sleep.

It’s time, think cat and man, for wicked things.

**Author's Note:**

> You've got to respect the fact that even his creators don't seem to fully know what Reeve's deal is. The best part of Dirge of Cerberus was undoubtedly the decision to say "Welp, even the immortal gunslinging vampire dude finds his relationship with that cat a bit weird." I'm eager to know what FFVII Remake will do with the character going forward. 
> 
> For my part , I've gone with hyper-repressed wizard, which allows a sufficiency of individual agency for Cait Sith, while still giving Reeve the lived in experience travelling with the party he needs to properly become nakama and complete his reformation. It still doesn't quite answer what Reeve does in board meetings, but then, I guess I an move my left arm and right arm seperately without thinking about it, so maybe Reeve's just very used to it.


End file.
